Vector

by James Abel

  It made sense to me. The Amazon was far from the Mideast, but the whole modus of terrorist organizations is that they pop up where you don’t expect them. Hunt them in Syria and they show up in Yemen. Send agents to Yemen and next thing you know, they’re in Brazil.

  “The world is crisscrossed by invisible highways,” Ray continued, sensing a more receptive audience. “Don’t think of them as routes for specific items but as toll roads. The road for illegal migrants will be used one day by arms merchants. Then cocaine mules. Cargo is interchangeable. Once a road exists, anyone can use it. If you’re looking on Highway 90, they’ll be moving on Route 66, and 66 goes through the Amazon. You’ve got new airports there. New cities going up. A population of millions. Think Wild West. Gold rush. Arms. Loose law enforcement.”

  What Ray wanted, he explained, Stuart having been asked to leave, was for us to pay attention in case anything looked off, ask casually about the presence of Muslim groups, steer talks with officials, look for any thread that might lead to a terrorist training camp in the jungle.

  “You know how to do it, boys,” Ray said.

  “You’ve got a million other people to ask,” Eddie said.

  “But you two are the best,” Ray said, concentrating on me. “You’ll have my phone number, and I’ll be available twenty-four hours a day. Ask a few questions. I trust your instinct. Just sign the nondisclosure agreement and . . .”

  “No signatures,” I interrupted.

  “But, Joe . . .”

  “Last time we signed something you guys almost locked me away in Leavenworth,” I said, aware, with a sinking feeling, that I’d started negotiating. “You want a favor? Then if I want to pick up the phone and call the Times right now and tell them about the rumor, I’ll do it. No lawyers. No signatures. We’re civilians now. So our rules.”

  Eddie looked up at me, and you had to know him to see that his straight-on stare meant he was feeling betrayed. One, you said we were finished with this stuff. It’s not even an emergency, just a rumor. I don’t trust Ray.

  My own look back meant, I know. But what are we supposed to do if there’s really a training camp there?

  Ray saw the looks. “Good. So you’ll sign?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  Ray stood and announced that would not do. We had to sign. If we wouldn’t, his hands were tied. He shrugged and shook hands with Stuart, who had come back in, nervous, and with Eddie, who relaxed, and me. Ray and I experienced one of those who-has-the-stronger-grip moments, which guys do even if they are presidents. Vladimir Putin shakes Trump’s hand. He squeezes. So does Trump. They both smile. Babies“R”Us.

  Ray walked to the door. He turned back around, grinning. I had a feeling he’d just won some private bet.

  “I told them you’d never sign. It’s a deal,” he said.

  • • •

  I snapped back to the present. Our outboard boat was closing the last ten feet toward the next draga, last chance to learn on the water about Eddie. The gunwale rode inches from the water. The temperature had to be 105. Sweat soaked my shirt, cargo shorts, armpits. I’ll never be finished with secrets, I thought. In the water floated debris: soiled paper plates, floating orange peels, a splintery log, but as we drew abreast the log had eyes. The eyes blinked. The log dived, showing a nine-foot tail. Caiman.

  “People come here with big ideas. They never last,” Anasasio said, nodding as if he’d just imparted great and historic wisdom. His bottom front tooth gleamed, gold.

  As we pulled up, Anasasio waved to the raggedy crew of six glaring down at us. They were a tough-looking bunch in cutoffs, sweat-stained black-and-white logo Botafogo team soccer shirts, and grimy tractor caps. Their bellies were swollen from beer or amoebas. The captain was an Asian Indian, with thick gray-flecked hair, goatee, and massive forearms. They all radiated antagonism, Stay away.

  Anasasio called up to the crew, and I recognized Portuguese words for doctor, important, and missing. The captain shook his head. I heard ouro, which means gold, and mercúrio, which means mercury. Anasasio snapped a threat back. The argument raged as the crew stared. The captain fell silent, and Anasasio turned to me with a broad smile.

  “He says we are very welcome aboard.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like.”

  “Oh, that is because they are about to make the gold. But I said you would not interrupt. I said you are not here about the use of illegal mercury. In fact you will find this very fascinating. You will see the gold made.”

  “I’m not interested in gold.”

  “Everyone is interested in gold,” Anasasio said, paying our driver in real, reaching for the rope ladder. “Watch your step. I would not want you to fall into the river. Piranhas have an undeserved reputation. Usually they do not bother people. But here they have had a taste of men.”

  THREE

  “Every day, we get gold,” the captain bragged.

  I tried to hold in my impatience. I was in an agony of waiting and couldn’t care less about stupid gold. It was almost impossible to hear him and Anasasio talking over the roaring of the pump. We stood on the vibrating aft deck, the captain pointing with pride to a python-thick rubber air hose snaking over the side and into the brown water. Thirty feet down, he explained while I pretended to pay attention, Miguel, the diver, wore a dry suit and helmet and stood on the bottom and held a vacuum attachment that sucked up mud.

  “Professor Miguel taught math at the university. Here he earns one hundred times what he made in a month,” Anasasio said.

  Was Eddie here earlier?

  The mud sprayed out behind us onto a floor-to-ceiling wooden sluice box, its ramplike surface covered by a thick synthetic carpet. “The carpet traps gold and allows lighter water to run back into the river,” Anasasio translated, as delighted as a boy at an ice cream factory, all thoughts of Eddie wiped away by proximity to gold. “They do this twenty-four hours a day. But now we will see what they have found.”

  Questions multiplied in my head as two twentysomething crew members stepped up to the sluice box. The engine stopped. The black water ceased pouring onto the carpet.

  Is Anasasio eager to go back to town because he’s tired, or involved? What if Eddie was taken because he asked questions about the wrong thing? What if there’s really a training camp in the jungle, and he is a prisoner there?

  “Two dragas can be next to each other,” Anasasio explained as the deck rocked from a drill smacking into rock far below. “One brings up three kilos, worth one hundred twenty thousand U.S. dollars. The other . . . nothing. It is a miracle.”

  From the stories I heard, it’s probable that Eddie caught malaria. He and I are taking different preventatives because he’s allergic to one. He must have contracted a resistant strain.

  A chubby, intent-looking redheaded man in a soiled floral print shirt—unbuttoned to fat—waddled up with a glass jar, “filled with liquid mercury,” Anasasio said. “This man is named Rooster.” Rooster poured the silvery stuff into a cut-off oil drum as diesel smoke from the pump blew into our faces. “The mercury fuses with the gold,” Anasasio said excitedly, over the roar.

  Shoulders jerking like a pneumatic drill operator’s, Rooster used a long-handled electric mixer to churn up the mercury, silt, and gold. The sense of movement never stopped. The deck rocked as the drill operator below punched into river bottom. The river rushed into rapids eighty yards away. The anchor cable quivered from the current as more “flying boats,” as Anasasio called them, brought crewmen from the bars or whorehouses onshore to other dragas.

  “Anasasio, ask the captain if . . .”

  The captain snarled at me in Portuguese. I didn’t need translation. “Wait for the gold!”

  The redheaded crewman, Rooster, inserted a garden hose into the bucket. The water washed excess sand onto the deck and, through gaps in the planking, into the river. The cr
ew stood transfixed. Anasasio had grown unnaturally still.

  Gold fever was the paramount disease here for ten thousand miners. Rooster poured the gold/mercury mix onto an old T-shirt and used the fabric as a strainer. He squeezed out the T-shirt, and silvery mercury ran out, into a flat pan. Anasasio said, “They will reuse the mercury.”

  When Rooster opened the shirt, an irregular ball, the size of a large marble, lay inside. It looked like clay, not like anything worth money.

  “Now the best part,” Anasasio breathed.

  Get this over with so I can ask about Eddie.

  The pudgy crewman carried the ball into a closet on deck and waddled out carrying a small portable oven on a tripod, with a spigot jutting out the top. He put the mud ball in a tin pan and the pan in the oven, and shut the door. He lit a fire with a match beneath the tripod. After two minutes steam oozed from the spigot.

  “Mercury flies away,” said Anasasio. “It will come back as rain.”

  Rooster opened the oven and, hands protected by thick mitts, pulled out the pan. The mud ball was gone. In the pan lay a pool of molten gold, with rainbow colors: crimson and emerald and cobalt rippling across the surface in the seconds it took to dry. The hardened mass was the diameter of a coffee cup and as thick and pitted as a potato pancake. Sunlight brightened the surface. It looked pure and clean. Rooster placed it in my palm. It was cool to the touch, heavier than it looked.

  Anasasio told me, “Okay, Joe. Ask about Eddie now!”

  Three minutes later—after the captain finished his story—Anasasio turned to me, looking stricken. He said too softly, “I think we have the answer.”

  His expression filled me with an agony of fear.

  “The captain says that Dr. Nakamura was here. He was shivering, but working, asking about malaria. He left to go to another draga, the Santa Catarina. Many men were sick there. But, Joe . . .” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “The Santa Catarina is no more. Its anchor cable snapped. It went into the rapids. All aboard died.”

  I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. The heat filled my head and my vision shrank. I gazed toward the turgid foam marking the narrow rapids. There, on muddy shore, lay wooden debris left by smashed, destroyed dragas, pieces of boat, clothing, and cutlery that had washed up.

  I’m going to have to phone Eddie’s family.

  The captain pulled at Anasasio’s arm and began another explanation, pointing at the gold ball. The gold that could not bring back Eddie. We’ll walk along the river. We’ll look for his body. I felt a nudge at my side and found myself looking into the dirty green eyes of the miner named Rooster. But what I saw wasn’t sympathy. It was something more urgent. The eyes slid left, toward the sluice boxes. Then Rooster moved that way—come with me—as the captain and Anasasio grew more animated in their talk. Eddie was forgotten. To them he was one more casualty of the rapids. The men would be on their favorite subject . . . gold.

  Wait a minute! He knows I don’t speak Portuguese. Does Rooster speak English?

  My pulse fluttered to life. Anasasio’s back was to us as we moved to the smoke-spewing pump. It looked about a hundred years old, its pistons chugging like some factory engine in the year 1900. The whole contraption seemed to be straining so hard it might tear the ship apart. Water rushed from the hose again, gushed down the screens and into the sluice boxes in the perpetual hunt for gold. Rooster pretended to adjust the hose. His English, when it came, was so nasal that there was a lag time between my hearing and understanding. He seemed to be talking through his nose.

  “Your translator is lying to you.”

  I felt a surge of hope. “How do you speak English?”

  “I worked as a tour guide in Bahia and came here when I lost my job. Those union people are thieves and liars. They take our dues and do nothing. They sell cocaine. That man is not telling you what the captain really says.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Your friend did not go to the Santa Catarina. He boarded a flying boat to go to the hospital. He was very ill, like the other men who have disappeared.”

  “What other men?” Now my pulse sped up as I realized that the captain saw us talking. But the captain laid a hand on Anasasio’s shoulder to keep him from turning. The captain wanted my conversation with Rooster to continue.

  But why? Because Anasasio lied to me? Or because these miners are the liars and want to steer me away?

  Rooster said, “The sickest men have been disappearing. They leave their dragas for the hospital but do not reach Porto Velho. They are being taken. This happened to my brother. I think your friend went north.”

  “Taken?” I stared into the chubby, earnest face and recognized fear and self-blame and saw that once again, retired or not, I had returned to my old haunt, the land of liars.

  “Where are the missing people being taken?” I asked.

  “Upriver.”

  “Why kidnap sick people?”

  “To sell them. I heard a story from the Indian who worked on the Muito Ouro and now is in town. He said there is a foreign doctor upriver, who lives on an island and pays money for sick men. He said the island has guards. But stories are easy to learn because half the time they are not true. Maybe you will find out if this one is.”

  “Why buy sick people? It makes no sense.”

  “The Indian said they keep them in a little house.”

  “And the doctor is foreign? From where?”

  A shrug. “He said the doctor came a year ago, to help the old one already there. He said at first the new doctor helped villagers and Indians, but then more foreigners arrived, with guns. Then the sick miners began to come.”

  “How can I talk to this Indian?”

  Rooster suddenly stepped back angrily, and his face told me to break off questions. Anasasio must have turned around. Rooster started yelling in Portuguese. He slammed his fist on the sluice box. He was a good actor. He shouted, “Perigoso,” which means dangerous, and he shoved me away from the apparatus. Then he spun and spat something at Anasasio. Can’t you control your gringo?

  Anasasio’s eyes lingered on Rooster for a fraction of a second too long. Then they slid to me, and he said, shrewd speculation in his voice, “You got too close, Joe. You must not touch the machine, you know.”

  One of the other crew members joined in with Rooster, poking his finger at my face. It hit me that they all knew I’d not touched the machinery. That—when they’d looked unfriendly as we approached the boat—the anger may not have been directed at me, but at Anasasio. Their union rep.

  They are scared of him. But why?

  I felt a familiar clenching in my belly. This is what always happens. You fly into the new place. You are surrounded by strangers. Some are lying but you can’t tell who. You can’t judge by clothing or by income level. The rich man could be the enemy. Or the poor one. Or the smiling child. You must make choices and make them fast. This was tough enough in the days when I could call Washington for help; from research people, search satellites, our embassy. I’d tried already with Ray Havlicek. I’d called him days ago. He’d been sympathetic, but impotent.

  “My hands are tied, Joe. Officially, you’re not there. Maybe if you’d found the camp I might be able to push things, but Eddie getting sick is unrelated.”

  “Ray, just say it’s related. Make up something!”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  Welcome to civilian life, I thought bitterly, free of high-level interference, but also of high-level help.

  I will find you, Eddie.

  Anasasio told me that we were leaving. He steered me to the gunwale, and the captain grunted good-bye. The crew went back to work. There was no way to ask more questions. Rooster’s back was to me. We might have never met.

  “There are no more boats to visit, Joe. Let’s go home. You coul
d use some sleep.”

  I need a gun, I told myself. There must be a gun here.

  My options had dwindled. I needed to find an Indian in town. If the guy even existed. But there were 400,000 people in town, and lots of them were probably Indians. “Town” consisted of at least fifteen square miles: slums, office buildings, shopping, a soccer stadium. I had no idea where to go, what to look for, if the Indian had gone back to his village, or what language he spoke. Or even his name. Rooster had called the Indian “he,” so it was a guy. Old guy? Young guy?

  I’ll ask Anasasio to drop me off in town. I’ll get a car and come back here on my own, like Eddie did, and get back on that draga and look for more answers.

  But then there was no need to do that.

  Because, on the way to shore, in the little flying boat, I found a clue.

  FOUR

  The first victim was an airline baggage handler named Mikaela Dehlman. On the night of July 11 she watched an unclaimed parcel from Flight 1264 out of Frankfurt, Germany, go around and around on a luggage carousel at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, twenty-two miles from downtown. She was unaware that the national terrorism alert level had gone to red.

  The unclaimed package lacked a name tag, or even destination tag. They’d shredded. The box was rectangular, about eight inches long, but the wrapping had ripped, and a piece of wooden corner had splintered at the top.

  All the passengers had left.

  Mikaela picked up the package and, as instructed in a recent security advisory, took it to room 1002A where lost baggage lay, waiting, if not claimed by owner, for eventual X-ray and opening. Sometimes cargo stayed here for days. Mikaela noticed that the parcel had not started its journey in Frankfurt, but from Rio. Probably the package had been put on the wrong plane, sent to Europe by mistake.

  It was really interesting looking, she thought, trying to peer inside. She saw plastic wrapping in there, and what looked like a small statue and a clay pot. It was probably artwork. And artwork can be worth a lot, she knew. She and Glenn had taken a walk around Houston’s galleries a few weeks earlier, and she’d been blown away by prices. One little vase had been tagged at $8,000.